New Comprehensive Campaign: Chart of Standards, Donor Assignment to the Chart, Managing Priorities

Thom Boivin

We're in the early, quiet phase of a new comprehensive campaign. I'm wondering what other users of Raiser's Edge/Raiser's Edge NXT have found as effective for:

• Recording the donors that are being targeted per their Chart of Standards for their campaign.
• Organizing disparate fundraising priorities, where some priorities are very granular and others are larger buckets of related needs.
• Recording prospect management for the campaign: keep it separate from past (and possibly ongoing) prospecting classification, or re-start prospect evaluation/classification for those targeted for the campaign?

Any advice on structuring for a comprehensive campaign is gratefully accepted!

Faith Murray

We went through this process about 3 years ago, with the help of an excellent campaign consultant. I'm glad we recorded everything, as it has affected our solicitation approaches all the way up to this autumn's direct mail appeals.

All donors were assigned an ask amount and type: in-person solicitation or direct mail. Because this included our entire donor universe, we were engaging volunteers with no RE access or user accounts and reaching out to much larger numbers of people than we normally have manpower to maintain in a portfolio. For this reason, using proposals was unwieldy.

Instead, we created attributes for campaign tracking. One attribute tracked the specific ask amount and intention. A second attribute tracked whether the person was slotted for a phone ask, a visit, or direct mail, and from whom. This also allowed us to keep their campaign solicitation process separate from other tracking and classifications in their record. We used this information to pull subsequent follow-up lists; for segmenting them according to ask types in later bulk mailings; and for refining our solicitation lists in major gift prospecting.

Now that our campaign is past our initial push and winding down into its Signature Phase, we have the luxury of focusing on a much smaller group of only a few hundred people for major gifts, and now I do use the Prospect tab and Proposals for this effort. Thankfully, you can have more than one Proposal on an individual, and you can group your projects within the Proposal fields.